Decision Meeting #18 Goal & Agenda

Background

The dial-in information for this week's meeting is here. The Decision Incubator Activity is intended to explore the use cases and design of a Decision Representation format (e.g. in XML, RDF, OWL…) available on the wiki along with its use by participants in testbed settings for experiments and exercises. Each meeting will be an opportunity to summarize progress & contributions to the wiki, review next steps and action items, and to review the current representation format.

Summary from the Last Meeting

Our last meeting #17 (see minutes), occurred during the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) and we were pleased to know that our colleague, Eva Blomqvist, was attending and supporting the Workshop on Ontology Patterns. As part of her activities, Eva presented our incubator position paper, "A Decision-Making Format for the Semantic Web". We will look forward to receiving an update from her at this meeting. Meanwhile, Jeff presented the latest on the Common Decision Exchange Protocol (CDEP) with Examples, an XML-based format for representing decisions. This format includes some interesting and useful aspects for representing decisions. The format provides support for representing the basic components of a decision, including question, answer, options, metrics and decision state. The examples demonstrate that the format allows for light, concise representations as well as more detailed and extensive. One of the goals is to enable this type of format to be converted into a more expressive semantic format based on the work of this incubator. The XML format can be useful to explore decision representation in a traditional XML environment, enabling a conversion using GRDDL to semantic form, while educating potential users on the benefits of the more expressive semantic representation and the benefits of a semantic context for enabling inferencing.

Goal for this Meeting

At this December 9th, 2010 meeting of the Decision Incubator, we are fortunate to have invited participants from The Mitre Corporation, including Jill Drury and Gary Klein. The Mitre team is conducting significant research exploring the weighting strategies used by decision makers for valuing the relative robustness of options presented in the decision space. Their work applies broadly, but includes a focus on emergency management. Their ongoing work is to develop decision spaces to aid collaborative decision making within and across agencies and organizations. We will learn about their research and have the opportunity to discuss the implications for decision representation. We'll also have the opportunity to discuss opportunities and benefits of collaboration.

The other important agenda item for our meeting is to receive an update from Eva on her experiences at the ISWC, including the successful presentation of our position paper and the related design work performed at the Workshop on Ontology Patterns. Eva served many roles as presenter, educator, and facilitator at the workshop. Her knowledge, insights and experience are invaluable and we look forward to hearing about her latest activities.

Agenda

The following agenda items will be discussed at the next meeting. The topic, time, summary and discussion leader are provided for each agenda item.

(0) Introductions & Agenda Overview (5 min, Jeff)

We'll briefly consider the current status and agenda items for any suggested changes.

(1) Mitre Presentation on Decision Research(30 min Jill/Gary)

Jill Drury and Gary Klein from The Mitre Corporation will present an overview of their decision research, providing the opportunity for discussion on the impact on and role for decision/knowledge representation. We can visit on potential collaborative opportunities.

(2) Update from ISWC 2010 (15 min Eva)

(3) Around the Horn (15 min All)

We'll see if we can visit with each of our participants to get an update on latest activities in representing or modeling decisions, security, situation reporting or other areas relevant for decision-making.